Matt writes that local Pizza Hut used to have a $10 minimum for online delivery orders. That’s fair enough, and a common practice. But when the chain raised the minimum to $10.50 at the same time that they debuted a $10 pizza promotion. Is Pizza Hut deliberately trying to encourage customers to order extra items they don’t need to make the minimum?

I’ve been using Pizza Hut’s online ordering service for roughly 5 years now, and I’ve probably placed over 100 orders in that time. When they first started the online ordering service, the minimum delivery amount was $8. This seemed like a fair price to me, although they still charge you a $2 delivery amount, so frankly, I don’t know why they enforce a minimum delivery amount, but that’s beside the point. Roughly a year ago, they raised this amount of $10. This seemed kind of unfair, but I’ve been a customer for a while, and I guess I didn’t mind too much. It meant that sometimes I’d have to add a bottle of water (that I didn’t really want) to my order to get it delivered. This was annoying, but I made due. Recently though, I tried to order a pizza under their “Any pizza for $10″ promotion. I was told when I tried to checkout that now the minimum delivery amount was $10.50. This seems absolutely crazy to me, and I have no idea why they’d raise the minimum delivery amount by $.50 other than to screw over their customers and force them to buy items they don’t want. I contacted Pizza Hut from their online contact form as soon as I encountered this, and got an automated response back, but no actual email (even though I requested to be contacted). I also called their customer support line (which is only open a few hours a day), told them my problem, and was told that they didn’t know why it had been raised, but someone would call me back in 3 days. This never happened either.

I got hungry for pizza last night and submitted an order from Papa John’s online service for a large pizza for $10, and they had no problem delivering it to me. As soon as I placed the order, I told pizza hut that I did so via their online contact form, but as of yet, I’ve still heard nothing back.

If I called the store, I’m sure they’d deliver a pizza to me for $10, but I’m not sure why Pizza Hut is pushing it’s online service, yet penalizing the people who use it.

I just wanted you to be aware of this issue so hopefully it will come to light and they’ll change this ridiculous policy.

Personally, I don’t understand the problem, because there’s no point to ordering from Pizza Hut if you’re not going to get breadsticks. But that’s me.